CES 2007 Photo Report

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Entering Vegas, Samsung, Creative, and ECS

Last week a few members of the HotHardware crew hopped on a plane and headed out to sunny Las Vegas, Nevada for the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show. We make the trek every year not only to check out the latest and greatest in consumer electronics and PC technology, but to meet face to face with representatives from many of the companies we work with throughout the year, and to rub elbows with many of our peers as well.

In its 40 year existence, CES has morphed into a gigantic event that fills not only the enormous Las Vegas Convention Center, but numerous suites and hotel meeting rooms surrounding the event. The show is a great place to witness upcoming products and technology demos, but if there is something we've learned in the years that we've been covering the event is that you simply can't see it all. CES is so huge the roughly 3.2 million square feet of the LVCC can't contain it! And even if you spent every minute of the show walking the floor, four business days isn't enough time to soak everything in.

We think that we saw some of the hottest hardware on display at CES, however, and snapped a few pics of some of the coolest products along the way. Feast your eyes on the technological goodness that was CES 2007...

While traversing the show floor, Samsung's booth caught our eyes due to the sheer number of large televisions and flat panels on display. A couple of the most interesting products Samsung was showcasing were their VIA-powered UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC), which was also on display at the Lunch@Pieros's event, and a gargantuan 102" Plasma 1080P Television. Personally, I'm a big TV guy and love to hunker down in front of the boob-tube with some snacks to watch a good movie, but standing in front of 102" of plasma was a different experience altogether. It felt like we were catching a sun tan standing in front of that thing. Wow. Imagine fragging away on that puppy?

Creative Lab's booth was fairly tame as far as new PC-technology went. They had pro-gamer Jonathon "Fatal1ty" Wendel perched in front of a couple of systems kickin' the stuffing out of show-goers who wanted to take a chance and try to Frag the great "Fatal1ty" in a game of Q4, but the products on display consisted mostly of Creative's existing X-Fi line of sound cards, speakers, CE devices like their Harmony remotes, and portable media players like the Zen V Plus pictured here.

ECS also took a laid back approach to this year's CES. Many of the products on display in ECS' suite, which was on the strip away from the Convention Center, were products the company wouldn't be selling directly to consumers (like laptops, UMPCs, and Media Center PCs), but rather to large OEMs who would re-badge them their own. ECS also showed off a slew of motherboards and their upcoming line of graphics cards based on NVIDIA's GeForce 8 Series of GPUs. Their second-gen VIIV compliant Media Center PC (pictured here) was one of the most exciting products, however. The little box was powered by an Intel Core CPU, and featured integrated graphics, HD Audio, TV and FM tuners, and a host of inputs and outputs, including HDMI.